Extract from yet to be published ghost-writing project. 

We left from Bondi at eight o’clock, and I drove until we stopped somewhere for morning tea. The plan was to stop for lunch at Taree which was five and a half hours up the Pacific Highway. Mum took over the driving. Mike was asleep with his head on my lap in the front bench seat and Jenny was in the passenger seat behind me, and Jessica in the passenger seat behind Mum. The girls were asleep with their backs against the doors and their feet up on the seat. I’d been dozing on and off and had just woken up.

The Pacific Highway is like a big causeway, built up, with grassed sides sloping down. Just before one o’clock we were about 15kms short of Taree at Possum Brush and going round an S bend. We came out of the left hand curve of the bottom part of the S, and were heading towards a right hander. It had been raining. It wasn’t raining but the roads were still wet, and the back end of the Falcon slid out. Mum couldn’t control it and we went off the road to the left almost hitting a car coming towards us.

Once we hit the grass, driver’s quadrant first, the car took off. It gathered speed as we hurtled 50 metres down the embankment towards a group of gum trees at the bottom of the hill. Panic rattled my eyeballs but not at anything specific. Everything whooshed past us as the car got faster and faster. It took forever….and it took no time at all. Sliding down that hill, the car racing and racing. No-one saying anything. Mum didn’t scream or call out. I didn’t look at her. As we were about to hit the trees I instinctively crouched over Mike like they tell you to on a plane.

On impact there was a split second of massive noise and savage jarring and then I must have been knocked out. The car bounced so hard it ended up several lengths back from the trees with the back end just touching the river. We had hit two trees side on and the impact forced two enormous trunk-shaped dents into the side of the car.

When I came to there were people everywhere and a guy was leaning into the car. Jessica called out. Mum was laying half on top of me and she was a big woman. Her seat belt sort of held her up, but her forehead was half open, sheared on the rear vision mirror. Fluids from her body leaked over me. I called back to Jessica, but she had gone quiet. People talked to me intermittently through the driver’s side. They’d gone in through the back as well, and a woman who said she was a nurse, asked me what my name was.

The car kept slipping further into the river and the stink of petrol pissing out of the tank was everywhere. Somebody got into the river and swam around to give me a blanket through my window because they couldn’t get me out. I knew Mum was in a bad way, but there was nothing I could do. I was trapped. I never saw Mike. He was up the hill. They’d managed to pull him out before I gained consciousness, this ten year old boy pulled uphill across Mum through the driver’s window. They kept telling me, “Your boy’s up there on the hill, away from the car in case it catches fire.” They didn’t know whether it was going to keep slipping into the river or whether it was going to catch fire, or both.

They asked how I was, and I kept asking, “How are the girls?”

“Girls,” they said, “there’s one.”

“No, no, there’s two.”